Customers Buy Into F-Commerce

More consumers are buying into social commerce, according to recent data from shopping cart application provider Ecwid.

The data was aggregated from merchants who are leveraging Ecwid’s Facebook application, and it reveals that in Q3 of 2012, total sales from all Ecwid-powered Facebook stores grew 36 percent from the previous quarter, while Facebook store orders grew by 39 percent in the same time frame. Furthermore, the data shows that the majority of these social stores are owned by small- to medium-sized businesses.

“F-Commerce could stand for ’flourishing’ commerce in the SMB market we serve,” said Jim O’Hara, president of Ecwid, Inc. “While some big name retailers have misfired at Facebook commerce, we see a different story with small businesses, which seem to be more effective at connecting personally with social audiences.”

It is important to note that despite the varied success that merchants have with F-commerce, Ecwid data from the last two years found that merchants who sell on both the traditional Web and Facebook storefronts, generate between 9 percent and 22 percent of their online income from Facebook.